Thrustmaster’s TX steering wheel will transform your Forza experience

It's wheely immersive.

That the wheel revealed Forza Motorsport 5 to be truly immersive was one revelation, but the other thing to rock my world was the arrival (finally!) of the Nurburgring. Announced as a free addition at E3 last monday, by the time I turned on my Xbox One, the track (along with another five DLC cars) was ready and waiting for me, and Turn 10 did a great job. It’s now as authentically narrow and bumpy as the real "Green Hell," and between those two additions to the Forza experience, it’s actually a miracle I’ve gotten anything else done since.

Reverting back to a controller after several happy years of force-feedback steering wheels left me unclear about just how immersive Turn 10’s latest game truly was. The Xbox One debuted in November last year with a new protocol for communicating with peripherals, removing any hope for backward compatibility with my Xbox 360 racing setup. Microsoft undoubtedly had good reasons, but there’s no denying that it left manygamersannoyed at the prospect of having their expensive racing wheel setups for the Xbox 360 rendered obsolete. Now, after a couple of weeks with Thrustmaster’s Ferrari-branded product, I can report that the verdict is "OMG." Simply put, if you enjoy racing games and you own an Xbox One, your gameplay will be transformed with the addition of the Thrustmaster TX.

At first glance, the TX comes across as a balance between the old Xbox 360 wireless steering wheel and the more expensive products from the German company Fanatec. The wheel rim has the same kind of grippy rubber coating as the old Microsoft wheel, and the included pedals just have an accelerator and brake; there’s no third pedal for a clutch or gearstick included in the $399.99 package. However, that shouldn’t suggest it’s not a quality product—the gearshift paddles in particular have a marvelous 'clicky' action, and even if the brake pedal isn’t a clever potentiometer like Fanatec’s Clubsport set, it has good resistance and travel. The wheel is a 70 percent scale replica of the Ferrari 458's steering wheel, complete with a host of buttons and its "manettino" selector switch, so you can replicate all the Xbox One's controls (the D-pad is the red engine start button).

Setting it up is relatively straightforward: the wheel needs to be attached to the motor—a simple enough task—and the pedals are connected via an RJ11 plug. The wheel’s motor unit connects to your Xbox One (or PC) via a USB cable that could do with being a little longer and which actually breaks in half toward the end to reveal a PS/2 connector. The base of the motor is drilled to accept bolts in case you want to firmly mount it in a cockpit or to a desk, but the included clamp is quite good and should work well if you have an existing wheel stand (for example, it works flawlessly with my Fanatec RennSport stand).

The next step is to head over to Thrustmaster’s website to download the latest drivers, something that will require a PC. Thrustmaster, like Fanatec, doesn’t seem to provide any support for console gamers who use OS X instead of Windows, which is something I’d like to see change in the future, but I won’t be holding my breath. With that all done, it’s time to go racing.

Since the TX connects to the Xbox One via USB, there’s no need to pair the devices. Just fire up Forza 5 and hit the track. By the end of the first lap it’s clear that something special is going on. The feedback through the wheel is sublime, communicating every bump on the road, every rumble strip. Overwhelming the front tires’ grip makes the wheel go light just like in real life, although with much less of a pucker-factor given the lack of real consequences.

Potential bugbears? For one thing, the TX lacks the hardware tuning options (and presets) that Fanatec users will be familiar with. And while you can add more expensive pedals and a gearstick, they’ll need to be Thrustmaster items. In particular, the choice of RJ11 connectors for the pedals means there’s no hope of using any existing pedal set that connects with PS/2. Some people will probably balk at the price tag (although a quick online search reveals that you can find them for a little bit less than the $399 MSRP). However, I think at this point it’s worth considering the issue through the lens of the flight sim. For that, I’m going to hand the mic over to my colleague (and Ars Technica’s Ace Top Gun) Lee Hutchinson:

You buy a wheel to play driving games for the same reason that you buy a joystick to play flight simulators—the fidelity of the experience is substantially raised when using an input device similar to the real input device in the real object being simulated. It’s not a simple case of analog (stick) versus digital (D-pad) input, either, since all current and previous-gen consoles have analog jigglesticks on their controllers. For a flight simulator, a joystick gives you the ability to make more precise movements across a much wider range of motion and also typically brings many more control options under your thumbs and fingers than the controller’s buttons. Coupled with a HOTAS-style throttle, it's the best way to fly.

This applies to space combat games as well, even though they’re necessarily more arcade-y than atmospheric flight sims. There are some people who like flying in games like Freespace or Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen with a mouse; they’re welcome to it if it works for them, but it makes about as much sense as running a marathon in sandals or eating a fine meal with a straw. You can certainly do it, but there are better ways. A joystick in a flight game lets you execute more and more precise maneuvers and gives you access to a good array of the complex non-flight controls needed to make an airplane (or spaceship) go.

The downside, of course, is price. You have a mouse and a keyboard and a controller already, but a good wheel or a good joystick and throttle HOTAS setup will cost you a few hundred additional dollars. The value proposition there is that if you love playing these types of games, a proper controller will make you a far, far better player.